Elon Musk loves youngsters. No, most likely not like that, he’s only a large fan of having a lot of youngsters — as long as they don’t go having opinions of their very own, that’s. In truth, Musk loves youngsters a lot that he thinks you ought to have one. Have a couple of. Have a bunch, even. Simply, be sure to’re the sort who ought to be having youngsters first.
That is, successfully, the driving thought behind the Inhabitants Wellbeing Initiative, a venture out of the College of Texas at Austin that Musk established with a $10 million donation. It’s the thought behind Musk’s fixed start fee alarmism on social media, a subject he’s even paired with the racist “nice alternative” idea. A new Bloomberg report exhibits simply how deep Musk’s ties to the pronatalist motion go:
In the event you’ve paid unhealthily shut consideration, you could have additionally seen one other sample. It’s change into rarer and rarer for Musk to get by means of an interview or meet a world chief with out mentioning infants, generally along with his younger son X in tow. In Musk’s thoughts, world fertility charges will not be only a disaster, however the disaster. In 2022 he tweeted that “a collapsing start fee is the largest hazard civilization faces, by far.” In 2023 he informed Tucker Carlson, “After you have contraception and abortions and whatnot, now you may nonetheless fulfill the limbic intuition however not procreate.” He added, “Will civilization finish with a bang or a whimper? Effectively, it’s at the moment attempting to finish with a whimper in grownup diapers, which is miserable as hell.” He repeated a model of the grownup diapers line in an interview with Michael Milken on the Milken Institute’s annual convention this previous Might.
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The information don’t appear to have put Musk’s thoughts comfortable. He’s fathered at the least 12 kids, six of them up to now 5 years—three with the musician Grimes and three with Neuralink Corp.’s director of particular initiatives, Shivon Zilis, together with one who hasn’t been identified to the general public till now. That baby was born earlier this 12 months, in keeping with individuals conversant in the matter, who would solely focus on it on situation of anonymity. Zilis declined to remark, and Musk didn’t reply to inquiries.
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In 2021, not lengthy after shifting from California to Texas, Musk anonymously donated $10 million to the College of Texas at Austin, in keeping with his basis’s tax returns for that 12 months. This donation, Musk’s largest ever to increased schooling, established a analysis group referred to as the Inhabitants Wellbeing Initiative.
Publicly, PWI says its mission is “quantitative social science analysis.” Privately, it has stated it goals to legitimize the concept “low fertility is a key risk to long-run flourishing,” in keeping with copies of emails reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. (Businessweek obtained these and different e mail contents referenced all through this story by way of public information requests.)
Musk’s aim, by means of PWI, is to encourage increased start charges in hopes of stemming some type of sudden inhabitants collapse — a collapse that scientists largely agree is unrealistic bordering on unattainable. His intense concentrate on such an unlikely end result isn’t with out precedent, nevertheless: With Musk’s ties to the Moral Altruist motion in thoughts — a hyperlink Bloomberg additionally famous — this fear-based method echoes the EA method of longtermism.
Moral Altruism is an offshoot of utilitarianism, centered on doing the best good for the best variety of individuals — particularly, how wealthy individuals can greatest donate their cash to empirically assist extra individuals, moderately than specializing in causes they merely care about. The longtermist view expands to cowl potential future individuals inside that utilitarian viewpoint, arguing that they deserve safety most of all, and that one thing that threatens all of them — irrespective of how unlikely, like the parable of inhabitants collapse — should be fought towards in any respect prices. Abigail Thorn has an ideal description:
But, regardless of its EA roots, Musk’s pronatalist method — the one he’s spending all this cash on — doesn’t look like designed for all future individuals. One want solely look to Musk’s lengthy–operating fandom of eugenics–comedy Idiocracy (the 2000s have been a bizarre time) to see that he cares about what varieties of individuals inherit the earth. Bloomberg talks in regards to the eugenics of pronatalism in broad strokes, mentioning that the motion usually bends towards preserving particular races or traits, however we are able to look to Musk’s historical past to theorize about his private desired outcomes. From Mom Jones:
[Mother Jones journalist Garrison Hayes] zeroes in on a selected phenomenon: Musk is amplifying customers who will incorporate cherry-picked information and deceptive graphs into their argument as to why individuals of European descent are biologically superior, displaying how fringe accounts, like person @eyeslasho, expertise a drastic bounce in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for elevating “consciousness” in a thread final 12 months. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, by way of X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.)
“Individuals are nearly extra prone to easier charts with race and IQ than they’re to the actually difficult stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and analysis fellow on the Institute on Metropolitan Alternative, informed Garrison in a video interview. He added: “That is essentially the most fundamental statistical error within the ebook: Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”
Musk has lengthy held the concept C-sections lead to increased intelligence — a idea refuted by scientific research — however there’s extra to his beliefs than that. In these similar tweets, Musk ties “assortative mating” to “an enormous rise in exceptionally good individuals” — assortative mating being the tendency for like to draw like.
Elon Musk believes individuals ought to have extra infants. He believes these infants needs to be good, and he believes that’s greatest achieved by means of individuals breeding with others like them — within the phrenological sense. He believes that this effort is of world-saving significance, and believes it’s value tens of millions of {dollars} in monetary backing. Is that this somebody you wish to purchase a automotive from?
